Efficient Resource Allocation for Multiple Bid Packages and Projects in Enterprise

This article presents an approach to simultaneously assign the human and machine resources of an enterprise to ensure the successful execution of multiple concurrent projects and bid packages. The resulting work plans must meet all the needs and expectations of the bid package owners, and achieve three resource allocation objectives of the enterprise: minimize the operation costs of the work plan, minimize the idle time of the enterprise’s resources and minimize the work plans’ duration. For that, we propose a resource allocation mechanism that is developed based on the conjunction of branch-and-bound and topological sorting algorithms. The proposed algorithm is tested with two different data sets. A benchmark data set is used to compare the efficiency and robustness of our algorithm with others. A real data set that is adopted from an ERP system is used to demonstrate the algorithm’s suitability for practical use.